TagBanger WADE1 is the first in a short graffiti font series. This series will showcase the hand-styles of various mature street artists that Okaycat is working with. This first release highlights the style of one such graffiti writer, WADE1, who has an eclectic writing style after many years proliferating street art. Long-term graffiti artists develop their own style over their careers, spending as many endless hours honing their letter-forms as any full-time professional typographical artist.

Style, individuality, and originality are everything. These attributes are key to the graffiti artist’s tao. A writer who copies, or “bites” loses respect -- their work will be painted over or “crossed out” by all other writers. Okaycat’s TagBanger series aims to demonstrate just how widely these individual styles can diverge, likely due, at least in part, to the social pressures of a community that ruthlessly punishes copycats.

WADE1’s tags were transformed into vector format from a generous sampling of their most recent scrawls. Our TagBanger series may not be composed of the most legible or beautiful fonts, but we imagine there are uses for these whenever highly unusual handwriting is needed.

TagBanger WADE1 is extended, containing the full West European diacritics & a full set of ligatures, making it suitable for multilingual environments & publications.